House Republicans Denounce Obama’s Handling of Prisoner Exchange

WASHINGTON — After months of secret talks in early 2014 on a potential deal to swap five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for a captive American soldier, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an agreement seemed near that May. But the chief American negotiator sent an email to the Pentagon warning that any leak could scuttle it.

“There is great concern all around about possible leaks,” the negotiator, Stephen W. Preston, then the general counsel of the Pentagon, wrote, according to an email cited by a new report. “This concern is exacerbated by the prospect of notification to our overseers” in Congress.

Twenty-nine days later, Islamist militants in Afghanistan turned over Sergeant Bergdahl, and only then, less than three hours before the American military put the five Taliban detainees on a plane to Qatar, did the Pentagon tell congressional leaders what was happening. But a statute restricting detainee transfers says that lawmakers must be told 30 days beforehand.

The news of the prisoner exchange, and the Obama administration’s failure to comply with the 30-day notice statute, set off a legal and political uproar and an investigation by the House Armed Services Committee. On Thursday, the committee’s Republican members will make public a report, obtained by The New York Times, that sheds new light on the administration’s secret maneuvers before the swap and portrays the deal as both reckless and illegal.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Gary Ross, defended the prisoner exchange, saying that security arrangements with Qatar had substantially mitigated any threat posed by the five former detainees.

“We have an unwavering commitment and patriotic duty to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield,” he said. “We had a near-term opportunity to save Sergeant Bergdahl’s life, and we were committed to using every tool at our disposal to secure his safe return.”

The committee’s 98-page report cites numerous internal Pentagon emails and closed-door testimony by military officials. It provides many new details about the diplomatic efforts to reach the deal, including the pace of meetings and trips by Mr. Preston to negotiate the security arrangements, like monitoring and travel restrictions, that Qatar would impose on the former detainees.

At the time, there were rumors that on-again, off-again talks about a prisoner exchange, which had broken down several years earlier, might be underway again, but the administration repeatedly suggested to reporters and to Congress that nothing significant was going on. It did this in part by emphasizing that there were no “direct talks” with the Taliban. This was “obfuscatory,” the report said, since preparations were underway for indirect talks, with Qatar as an intermediary.

“The committee staff’s conversation with department representatives, coupled with the White House’s public demurral, left the committee with the impression that recent news stories were wrong and no recent or relevant activities had taken place in connection with a potential swap,” the report said.

Sergeant Bergdahl had left his base in Afghanistan without permission in 2009 and had been captured by insurgents, who held him in horrific conditions. The prisoner swap was politically controversial, with some critics saying it was a bad deal because it required letting dangerous Taliban detainees out of Guantánamo and because it might provide an incentive for further kidnappings of soldiers.

The military is weighing whether to prosecute Sergeant Bergdahl in a court-martial on a desertion charge, although the chief investigators recommended that he serve no jail time.

The new report largely ignores Sergeant Bergdahl’s complex case, focusing instead on the Taliban part of the deal. Among its details is information about how the Qatari attorney general came to the Indian Treaty Room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House and signed the security agreement on May 12, 2014, a step that was, at the time, unknown to Congress or the public.

Around the same time, the report said, the Qataris told the Americans that Sergeant Bergdahl’s health was declining, and that the Taliban’s “interest in keeping Sergeant Bergdahl alive” and its enthusiasm for the swap were waning. The Qataris warned that if news of the pending exchange leaked out, “the wheels come off.”

But the report expressed strong objections to the Obama administration’s decision not to keep the congressional oversight committees fully informed. It noted that the Armed Services Committee “routinely receives briefings about sensitive military operations before they occur.”

The report also shows that the Pentagon officials who normally plan transfers of lower-level detainees were largely sidelined in planning for the resettlement of the higher-level Taliban detainees in Qatar. It suggested that the secrecy and unusual process indicated that the administration’s motive was in part to avoid controversy that might disrupt its ability to rid itself of five harder-core detainees, making it easier to fulfill Mr. Obama’s goal of closing the Guantánamo prison.

None of the internal emails cited by the majority report corroborate that claim. In their dissenting report, the Democratic committee members agreed that it was lamentable that the executive branch had not obeyed the 30-day notice law. But they strongly objected to the Republican members’ broader conclusions, which it dismissed as “accusatory speculation.”

The Republican report also addresses legal arguments by the Obama administration that its violation of the statute was lawful because the statute was an unconstitutional constraint on President Obama’s commander-in-chief powers, at least when applied to a prisoner exchange deal in which any delay or leak could have endangered a captive American soldier’s life.

The report rejected those arguments as “evasive legal gymnastics.” The constitutional debate is important because of the precedent set by the transfer. Former advisers to Mr. Obama have argued that he has executive power to override other parts of the congressional transfer restrictions in order to close the Guantánamo prison before he leaves office in January 2017.

But the Democratic report said the constitutional issues were far murkier than the Republican report suggested and emphasized that the swap had saved an American soldier.

“As gravely disappointed as we may be over the administration’s failure to comply with a statutory notice requirement, the majority’s nakedly partisan effort to indict the administration and to second guess its decisions, in hindsight, while simultaneously expressing relief that the benefit of Sergeant Bergdahl’s safe return was in fact achieved, is as unfair as it is wrong,” it said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: House Republicans Denounce Obama’s Handling of Bergdahl Prisoner Exchange. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe